


No More Night Job

by ravenienne



Series: Retirement [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 03, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Character, Blindness, Catholicism, Chronic Pain, Disability, Disabled Character, Physical Disability, Post DDS3, Post-Season/Series 02, Religious Conflict, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Set after DDS3, Walking Canes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 13:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16409705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenienne/pseuds/ravenienne
Summary: “Not to worry, Sister, those days are behind me. I’m deaf in my right ear and even the left sounds… off. And I can’t even walk to the bathroom now.”“Yeah, well, you’re pretty banged up. The damage to your hip, your spine… Well, your days of doing backflips might be over, but… you’ll get back on your feet.”Or, how Matt's recovery from the explosion probably would have actually gone, if this were closer to the real world.





	No More Night Job

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for brief mentions of suicide/suicidal thoughts

_“... Metro General, maybe? Call 911?”_

_“He’s a vigilante. If he goes to the hospital, he’ll be arrested.”_

The voices sounded muffled, far away, like they were on the opposite end of a tunnel, but he was pretty sure they were here with him. But were they? He couldn’t smell them.

_“This is Sister Maggie Grace at St. Agnes Orphanage--”_

_“It’s Matthew. Jack Murdock’s son.”_

_“I’m so sorry, I made a mistake.”_ A faint click-- the phone? _“… Get wire cutters, we need to get him out of the suit.”_

xxXxx

_“Get Maggie. Tell her he’s awake.”_

_“How do you feel?”_

_“Don’t try to stand up.”_

“Elektra… Where… Where?” Matt shifted, trying to raise his torso.

_“St. Agnes. The orphanage. Don’t try to move.”_

“How… how long?”

_“Lay down. Several weeks.”_

Matt obeyed, his head feeling muddled. He reached to rub at his right ear, trying to loosen whatever must be blocking it. Then he remembered, “Elektra, where is she?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“I--” Matt groaned, having succeeded in sitting up this time and finding the muffled voices probably had a point in telling him to stay down.

“Stay in the bed. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“My right ear… I can’t…” He tried to turn, but he couldn’t orient himself, and a sudden pain sent him toppling backwards, toward where he had expected more bed but found only air.

He felt her hands on him -- the nun -- Maggie, someone had said? -- and she lifted him partially into her lap.

“Matthew,” she whispered, his name sounding like a curse.

He groaned. “I-- I can’t… I can’t see. I can’t see.”

xxXxx

Matt lay half awake in the bed in some semi-out-of-the-way wing of the orphanage. He was tired, so very tired, but he needed to meditate, even if he couldn’t sit up yet. How else would he heal? He rubbed again at his right ear, at the absence of sound from that side besides an annoying ringing. Even the sounds he caught in his left ear were different -- softer, less sharp. He hadn’t been able to rouse himself enough to figure out whether it was just the effects of having been asleep for so long, of his likely head injury, of his ongoing fatigue, or-- Well, it was probably from those factors, and all the more reason to meditate, in that case.

“Matthew?”

Matt startled slightly, head tilting. “Father. I-- I didn’t know you were there.”

“Must feel strange, to be back here,” Father Lantom stated as he came around to the chair by the side of Matt’s bed. “The place where you grew up.”

“I haven’t thanked you yet, Father.”

“Figured we could count on the nuns for their discretion. The nuns know who you are, but Sister Maggie swore them to secrecy, after she swore at me. If you want to take Communion, we could… or we could just talk.”

“Not today, Father.”

“I’m not much for mystical thinking, Matthew, but even I have to admit it was a miracle you survived.”

Matt rolled over onto his side, facing away from Father Lantom.

“Well, I’ll be around. I’ll, uh…” Father Lantom trailed off for a moment. “When you’re ready to talk, we’ll talk.”

xxXxx

The creaking of his open door was the first thing that clued Matt in to the nearby presence of children.

“Is he dead?”

At least two, then. One of them was approaching.

“Boo,” Matt said weakly.

“Who are you?”

“Same as you. I grew up here.”

“Dang! What happened to you?” A different voice.

“Life,” was Matt’s simple response.

“This room is off-limits.” That was Sister Maggie’s voice. He hadn’t heard her approaching. “And if you’re well enough to be up, you’re well enough for class.”

The boys fled with a quick “sorry” and Maggie came closer.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said.

“They’re scared of you, huh?”

“So were you, at their age. I need to change your gauze. Preferably without you flailing about like an idiot.” She continued as she snapped gloves on, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by all of this. You were always pissed off. Of course, back then you were just a boy who’d lost his eyesight. And now, you’re the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.”

“You’ve heard of me.”

“I live in an orphanage, not under a rock. I just never imagined it’d be one of ours running around in that Halloween costume. The things I’ve heard you can do… You are blind, right? You weren’t just faking it the whole time?”

“Heh. Congratulations. You’ve finally caught me,” Matt answered, his tone flat.

“It’s not a fair question?”

“Yeah, the accident blinded me. It just also, uh, sharpened my other senses.”

“Hm.”

“That was why all the… When I was here as a kid…” Matt trailed off, then cleared his throat roughly and quietly said, “Not to worry, Sister, those days are behind me. I’m deaf in my right ear and even the left sounds… off. And I can’t even walk to the bathroom now.”

“Yeah, well, you’re pretty banged up. The damage to your hip, your spine… Well, your days of doing backflips might be over, but… you’ll get back on your feet.” The sister stood up. “Well, now that you’re out of the woods…”

“You’d like me to go.”

“This is an orphanage, not a convalescent home.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“There must be at least one person I can call for you.”

“No. There’s no one. No one left.”

xxXxx

A couple of days later, Matt was in a wheelchair, being pushed by Father Lantom to a place somewhere in the basement of the Clinton Church. Getting down the stairs had been… interesting. That is, slow, painful, and embarrassing, but with the joint help of Sister Maggie and Father Lantom he had made it, and now he had lost track of the turns as he was wheeled to some place hidden away. Beneath the chapel, actually, according to Lantom.

He listened half-heartedly as Maggie quickly oriented him to the room, telling him things that he once would have been able to tell as soon as he entered the room, or at the least by giving a quick snap of his fingers to hear the pattern of the sound moving through the space. His object sense was seriously affected by the change in his hearing -- more than he would have thought, believing it to be more of a literal feeling than was apparently true.

He used the curved, wooden cane Father Lantom had brought him to slowly, painfully get a sense of the space, walking around the area and exploring it with his hands -- or, rather, hand, since he could hardly stand without a tight grip on the cane. Maggie kept up the usual banter with him as he did, an exchange that was becoming familiar even if it wasn’t quite yet friendly, exactly.

“What is this?” Matt asked as his hand encountered a thick book atop a dusty bookshelf.

“Dug those out of storage,” Maggie said, not answering his question. “You were probably the last one to read ‘em.”

Carefully balancing the book on the shelf, Matt flipped it open enough to get his hand inside, running his fingers over the words until he huffed, “My bible. All right, I get the hint.”

“I got the sense things are complicated with you and the guy upstairs.”

Matt gave a small smile and a little laugh. “No, not at all. If anything, I’d say we finally know where we stand with each other. ‘There was a man from the land of Uz…’”

“The Book of Job.”

“The Book of Job. Job was God’s most faithful servant, and God murdered all ten of Job’s children. He scorched his land, covered him in boils… And still, Job would not curse him. I too gave my sweat, my blood, my skin, because I believed I was God’s soldier.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Well, not anymore. I am what I do in the dark now.”

“You might hate God right now, but the feeling is not mutual.”

Matt shook his head. “No, I don’t hate him. I’ve just seen his true face, is all. God may look benevolent in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament… Well, it’s the Old Testament where he killed Job’s ten children, it’s the Old Testament where God struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, and it’s the Old Testament where God chose soldiers, champions of his cause.”

“It is not our place to question God, or His will. Job’s friends urged him to curse God, and he would not give in. And God blessed him.”

Matt gave a bitter laugh. “I’m not Job, and I know my truth now.”

“What truth?”

“Well, that in front of this God, I’d rather die as the Devil than live as Matt Murdock.”

“You might not have that choice.”

xxXxx

Matt tried, in a way he never really had before, to let his body heal. He was forced, more than he ever had been, to rest. He felt drained and tired, sleeping far more than he thought possible, for at least a couple of weeks after first waking. When he did get up and walk around, moving remained consistently painful in a way he had never really felt before. His right hip and lower back were stiff and tight, his leg and back burned fiercely, and intermittently an intense pain would shoot from his lower back down his right leg and partway into his left. And that was leaving aside his numerous scrapes and bruises, and his cracked ribs. Even without the pain, the weeks in bed had left his muscles atrophied much more than he could have predicted. It amazed him that his legs could shake after a simple turn about the room.

After weeks of working at it, he had increased his strength and endurance considerably. However, his hip and back still pained him, especially when walking, although the fierce burning was slowly turning into more of a deep ache. He still was not able to take more than a few steps without the aid of a cane. He had managed the stairs that led up to the main floor a couple of times on his own, but both times had been slow and painful. The hearing in his right ear remained stubbornly absent, aside from that obnoxious ringing that became especially annoying at times when the church was quiet. The hearing in his left seemed to have improved somewhat, but it still didn’t seem quite the same, and was seeming to plateau rather than continue to improve. He was still probably the world’s best eavesdropper, but things still felt a little… muddied, rougher. He couldn’t piece together a room, unmoving objects, like he used to. Sensing movement seemed less affected, but still diminished, and while heartbeats were still audible, he couldn’t hear them at the range he used to. Matt could tell that even if he was able to rehab his body to be able to fight like he used to, he didn’t think he would have the spatial awareness he would need unless his hearing improved quite a bit more.

Well, at least his eavesdropping ability was still mostly intact. It was how he heard Sister Maggie praying one day, appealing to his father, Jack, and calling him her son. After confronting Father Lantom, who confirmed the truth and that he had known, he took a small backpack of his few possessions and left the church, his white cane sweeping the path ahead of him and the wooden cane helping to support his weight on his left.

xxXxx

He wandered at first, not sure where to go next. His exchange with Sister Maggie… his mother… from several weeks prior rang in his ears.

_“I’d rather die as the Devil than live as Matt Murdock.”_

_“You might not have that choice.”_

It pained him to think that she may have been right. Dying as the Devil… well, he’d already tried that, and he’d failed. He knew what the Church’s stance would be on trying again, without the excuse -- however flimsy it might have been -- of saving someone else’s life. He might be feeling a bit shaky in his faith in God at the moment, but the thought of rebelling completely, even if he might like to on some level, was just unfathomable to him. And his days of fighting criminals on the streets were seeming further and further away the longer his pain, stiffness, and diminished hearing remained. But living as Matt Murdock once again…

His spiraling thoughts were eventually halted by his increasing pain. He had already walked farther than he had since before the Midland Circle incident. He paused and gently massaged his right thigh and hip slightly, delicately sniffing the air. He caught a whiff of coffee and, grateful that at least the neti pot had helped in clearing out his sinuses, headed slowly towards the smell.

Opening doors was somewhat awkward with the two canes, but fortunately was a skill he had figured out for the most part at Clinton Church. Once inside, he stood for a moment to get his bearings, turning his head back and forth a bit to try to help with spatially locating the sounds. A crowd of people to his right, hard to tell if they were in any sort of line… crowd of people to his left and ahead… which was the line for ordering? A moment later, a barista called out an order to his right and his question was answered, and he made his way to what seemed like the end of the line.

Several minutes later, his name and order were finally called. He walked up to the counter, but then froze, suddenly realizing he had no idea how he was going to carry his drink to a table. Could he handle walking that far without his wooden cane, especially with how increasingly sore his back and leg were? Plus, the barista had apparently already left the area, and he was only vaguely aware of where on the counter the hot drink might be, based on the smell and the heat source. Fortunately, he reluctantly supposed, someone nearby in the cluster of people waiting seemed to have noticed his predicament and stepped up closer to him on his right side.

They said something to him he couldn’t make out, and Matt internally cursed the noisy cafe. He turned his body more towards them, turning his head even farther so that his left ear would pick up their voice better.

“I’m sorry, I don’t hear well on that side. Did you say something to me?” He tried to give her his most encouraging, charming smile, but he wasn’t sure how well it would work these days. He was sure that, dressed in the cast-offs he had fled the church in and with several days of stubble on his chin, he didn’t look nearly as put together as he had in his Nelson & Murdock days.

“I was just asking… would you like some help taking that to a table, sir?” She sounded like a young woman from her voice, probably college-aged.

Cheeks pinking slightly, Matt nodded. “Yes, please.”

“There’s a table free over by the windows, to the left of the door as you’re walking in? Is that okay?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Matt sighed. He followed the sound of her footsteps and her voice as she gave occasional directions or comments over her shoulder, eventually lowering himself gratefully into a chair with his back to the window. As he sat and slowly sipped at his drink, he was finally confronted with actually considering his next steps. He didn’t think he had felt so lost since his father had passed.

xxXxx

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Foggy, especially on such short notice.”

Matt and Foggy were seated at a cafe not far from Foggy’s office at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz. Matt was nervously fiddling with the handle of his mug, and he was pretty sure Foggy was outright staring at him.

“What can I say? When your b-- when someone you thought was dead calls up out of the blue… well…”

“Yeah,” Matt says, tilting his head down in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Foggy.”

“For what? For not contacting me sooner, for… getting yourself killed in the first place?”

“For all of that,” Matt answered, bracing himself.

Foggy sighed. “Matt, right now I’m just glad you’re alive. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this not being a dream. This isn’t a dream, right? Ow!”

“Foggy,” Matt chuckled, “It’s not a dream. Did you just pinch yourself?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do in dreams to wake yourself up, or something, right? I don’t know, it’s what they do in the movies.”

“I don’t know about that, but no, this definitely isn’t a dream.”

“Right. Well, why now, Matt? Is something wrong?”

Now it was Matt’s turn to sigh. He ducked his head down towards the table. “I… no, well… I just… I was unconscious for a while, I guess, and then I was just…” He sighed again. “I don’t know, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Matt Murdock, anymore. But… I… Recent events have made staying where I was impossible. And I…” He swallowed, trying to find words. He made a living out of talking, for goodness sakes, why was it so hard now?

“Does this have anything to do with your leg, or whatever?” Foggy asked.

“Not exactly… Well, yeah, kind of… I’m not healing as well as I’d like. I…” He put his head in his hands. “My back and my hip are… And my hearing isn’t… I don’t think my night job is an option anymore, probably won’t ever be again. But I don’t know…”

“Hey, Matt.” Matt startled slightly when he felt Foggy’s hands on his shoulders, but he didn’t move and neither did Foggy. “We’ll figure it out. And I am always here for you, buddy, when you need it. Even when we’re fighting, I can’t leave you high and dry. We’re family, okay? Now, have you seen an actual doctor?”

Matt shrugged, trying to blink back the suspicious feeling of wetness behind his eyes. “I saw nuns, I’m not sure how much training they had. But Foggy, I don’t think it will make much of a difference, and what will I tell them happened?”

“You could be right, Matt, but the sooner you get checked out the sooner you’ll know for sure, and we can go from there. Plus, the longer you wait the less likely they can do anything. And Matt, if this isn’t going away -- which, yeah, I see your point -- you’re going to have to figure out what to tell people anyway.”

“Yeah,” Matt sniffed. (Cold weather, always making his nose run.) “I guess.”

“I’ll help you, okay? And Karen too, because there’s no way she’s staying out of this. We’ll figure it out.”

“Okay.”

xxXxx

Foggy was true to his word. He helped him pick up some contract work at HC&B, temporarily at least, and helped him figure out getting on an insurance plan and finding a doctor that actually accepted said plan. He even accompanied him to the appointment, lending emotional support as Matt sold the doctor his story of being an alcoholic (with some hinting of him being a bit promiscuous while under the influence), being caught in some sort of accident that he had blacked out a while back, and that he was getting clean now but had never had the injuries properly attended to. Matt had refused at first when Foggy suggested the story to him, but Foggy had made the very good points that the story was a) fairly believable, especially with how Matt Murdock had been acting the past couple of years, b) just embarrassing enough but not too embarrassing, c) shouldn’t get him in any legal trouble or danger of having his law license revoked, and d) would get the doctor to test him for diseases that he probably should be tested for given his Daredevil activities. Plus, Foggy had assured him that there were alcoholic recovery programs these days that did not require total abstinence, so he would be able to continuing imbibing with moderation.

Foggy also accompanied him to his follow-up appointment after having a series of scans on his back and hip. So when Matt left feeling utterly defeated, once again, Foggy was there to remind him all was not lost.

“Listen, buddy, I know it wasn’t what you were hoping for. But you already kind of knew it was pretty bad, right? And they said surgery might be able to help some?”

“Yeah, but it sounded like way down the line, not something they want to do any time soon.”

“Well, first step is PT, right? And yeah, they’re saying getting back full range of motion and being pain-free is unlikely, but--”

“So no night job, Foggy, end of story.”

“Matt, you already kind of knew that from what the audiologist said.”

Matt sighed. “Yeah.”

“The doctor thinks you might have a chance of walking without a cane. Or at least being able to walk farther without a cane. Let’s hold on to silver linings, okay? Start with aiming for being able to walk around the office without your support cane, or whatever they call it, so _you_ can start fetching the coffee from the kitchenette for a change.”

That got a laugh out of Matt. “Okay, we’ll start there.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know I have a few WIPs up here, and I haven't abandoned them, but I watched season 3 and this idea just stuck with me. I'm seriously considering continuing this, doing an AU of season 3. We will see!


End file.
